Official "Science News" Thread

[rogue]

Virtual reality is booming in the workplace amid the pandemic. Here’s why

How and Why Computers Roll Loaded Dice

The necessity of awe

Optimistic People Sleep Better

How Social Isolation Affects the Brain

Color-Changing Ink Turns Clothes into Giant Chemical Sensors

How to Trick Your Brain to Remember Almost Anything

How Dixie cups became the breakout startup of the 1918 pandemic

Wearable-tech glove translates sign language into speech in real time

17 ways technology could change the world by 2025

The Science of Fireworks

The face of the fish

Scientists finally solve the mystery behind a 100-year-old chemistry experiment

How does our brain fold? Study reveals new genetic insights

A Neural Network Generated a Bunch of Mutated-Looking New Animals

Do Nonhuman Animals Have Rights?

Why Some Words May Be More Memorable than Others

[ewmayer]

@above: "Optimistic People Sleep Better" -- or perhaps well-rested people tend to be more optimistic?

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Small Lab Makes Big Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Tech | OilPrice.com

Nuclear power has high hopes of coming back as a serious competitor in the utility sector through nuclear fusion, but it’s been requiring massive investments and several more years of development before it wins regulatory approval. Dense plasma focus (DPF) could open the door to fusion being adopted much faster and for being economically feasible.

Middlesex, NJ-based Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc., known as LPPFusion, may soon be leading the way in transitioning over to nuclear fusion through DPF.

So far, expensive, large-scale experimental facilities utilizing ultra-high power lasers and microwave generators, particle beams, giant superconducting magnet systems and other advanced technologies, has been the norm for nuclear fusion projects. But it's quite costly and has several years built into the testing and development process. One of the largest of these fusion projects has been the giant International Torus Experimental Reactor (ITER) under construction in southern France. It now has an estimated cost of over $40 billion.

DPF is opening the door to a streamlined, low-cost fusion future — and for gaining more support once again for nuclear as a smart power source to tap into. That comes years after the current technology, nuclear fission, lost support.

Headed by physicist Eric Lerner, who’s considered one of the leading global experts on plasma use in nuclear fusion, the LPPFusion team achieved landmark success in 2016 when its device reached an ion temperature of 2.8 billion degrees, by far the highest temperature achieved on any experiment so far. That came out to be over 200 times hotter than the center of the sun and more than 15 times the projected maximum temperature for the ITER in France.

LPPFusion has raised the bar and is coming close to creating conditions sufficient to achieve net energy generation — which levels out gross electricity generation minus the consumption of power stations' auxiliary services. So far, that’s been done on a small budget of $7 million that the lab has invested, with the support of a few dedicated collaborators. Lerner and team say they’ve raised the performance of its DPF technology, and are close to creating conditions sufficient for net energy generation — another persuasive argument in gaining support for the technology.

Its power generator is tapping into hydrogen-boron instead of the standard deuterium-tritium fuel. Hydrogen-boron doesn’t generate any radioactive waste, and taps into an unlimited supply of fuel. It also offers the possibility of direct conversion of fusion energy into electricity...

Whether it would be a good thing for humankind to have a cheap effectively unlimited source of energy is a question worth discussing - from where I'm sitting, it would simply help stupid humans exploit the planet's non-unlimited resources to exhaustion that much faster.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Whether it would be a good thing for humankind to have a cheap effectively unlimited source of energy is a question worth discussing - from where I'm sitting, it would simply help stupid humans exploit the planet's non-unlimited resources to exhaustion that much faster.

It also gets us out of this gravity well to where the resources are vastly greater.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Hmm. It seems the new approach uses hydrogen and boron. Here in the good ol' USA we've got plenty of mineral ores.

"Twenty Mule Team," in addition to having been the sponsor of the TV series Death Valley Days, sells borax, which has long been popular as a laundry additive and household cleaner. There is (or at least used to be) a hand soap made by the same company, Boraxo, which was powdered soap with borax. It worked pretty well. I understand that the UK and EU officially frown on borax.

Boric acid has long been used as an ingredient in eyewashes, and the pure crystalline stuff is sold as a way kill cockroaches. It is sometimes mixed with sugar for use as poison bait. The pure stuff may also applied to dry areas where the insects are known to be abundant. I have heard that the tiny crystals stick to them, and they ingest the stuff when they clean their antennae.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Hmm. It seems the new approach uses hydrogen and boron. Here in the good ol' USA we've got plenty of mineral ores.

Only a tiny amount of boron would be needed to supply the entire global energy requirements right now.

A single H + B¹¹ -> 3 He⁴ reaction releases 8 MeV, or 1.3e-11 J.

Current global energy usage is around 1e21 J per annum, so at 100% efficiency about 8e30 reactions will be required. 1 mole of B¹¹ contains 6e23 atoms and weighs 1.1e-2 kg. Consequently 1.4e5 kg of B¹¹ will be required per annum. That is 140 tonnes.

Natural boron is 80% B¹¹, which takes us up to 180 tonnes per annum of natural boron. Even if the overall efficiency is as low as 1%, the annual requirement is less than 20 thousand tonnes per annum. Current annual production is around 4 million tonnes.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by xilman

Only a tiny amount of boron would be needed to supply the entire global energy requirements right now.
...
Natural boron is 80% B¹¹, which takes us up to 180 tonnes per annum of natural boron. Even if the overall efficiency is as low as 1%, the annual requirement is less than 20 thousand tonnes per annum. Current annual production is around 4 million tonnes.

Assume 20%. 1000 tons/year.
Note though two things:
1) 50 years ago the USA had a 500 year supply of coal "at current rates of use".
Now it's 100 year supply "at current rates of use". Energy consumption tends to grow exponentially.
2) Arbitrarily large supply of chemical, fission, or fusion fuel does nothing to increase the hard limit of how much waste heat the planet can radiate to space annually. What increases that is:
a) high reflectivity during daylight hours to reduce solar gain, which is in conflict with use of large land areas for food production,
b) high emissivity & atmospheric transparency to space during night time hours to increase radiant heat transfer to deep space.
c) increase in mean absolute temperature; net radiant power is proportional to emissivity times area times (tsource⁴-tsink⁴). In other words, very substantial global warming.

Tsource is currently ~300K, so even a mere 4% increase in planetary radiant power requires some combination of massive geoengineering to change reflectivity and emissivity dynamically, and up to 3K temperature increase. Power use reduction and efficiency improvements seem more tractable. Practically speaking, human energy use can not be allowed to become a substantial percentage of the planet's available natural heat rejection rate.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by kriesel

1) 50 years ago the USA had a 500 year supply of coal "at current rates of use".
Now it's 100 year supply "at current rates of use".

I think it is more like 500 years at expected use rate. The current trend goes to Zero in less than 15 years.

[ewmayer]

I found the Wikipedia article on aneutronic fusion to be a valuable resource w.r.to the proton-¹¹B reaction. The one thing the article omits to desrcribe, however, is the "why?" re. the interesting nuclear reaction involved: One might figure that firing a proton at a ¹¹B nucleus with sufficient energy to overcome the mutual Coulomb repulsion would yield a stable ¹²C nucleus, but instead we get a proton-catalyzed fission neatly (and apparently with negligible other-nuclei byproducts, as one typically finds in heavy-element fission, with their wide range of smaller product nuclei) into three alpha particles, i.e. ⁴He nuclei.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I think it is more like 500 years at expected use rate. The current trend goes to Zero in less than 15 years.

Estimated 4. trillion tons in 1974; by various measures, in 2019, 0.47 trillion in 2019, or 0.25 trillion, or 0.015 trillion.
"Based on U.S. coal production in 2018, of about 0.76 billion short tons, the recoverable coal reserves would last about 332 years, and recoverable reserves at producing mines would last about 20 years. The actual number of years that those reserves will last depends on changes in production and reserves estimates."
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/...al-is-left.php

But all this misses the main point. Energy usage tends to grow exponentially. There are practical limits to such growth. Some of which are independent of fuel supply. One such limit is waste heat rejection. Another, in the case of chemical fuels, is the oxygen in the atmosphere is finite quantity. Below ~19% O₂, humans do not do well, and ODH alarms sound. In the other direction, 95% of green plants are C3 photosynthesizing that don't do well below ~150ppm CO₂ (die by 100ppm or less). "The C3 plants, originating during Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras, predate the C4 plants and still represent approximately 95% of Earth's plant biomass, including important food crops such as rice, wheat, soybeans and barley." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolog...tory_of_oxygen

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

I found the Wikipedia article on aneutronic fusion to be a valuable resource w.r.to the proton-¹¹B reaction. The one thing the article omits to describe, however, is the "why?" re. the interesting nuclear reaction involved: One might figure that firing a proton at a ¹¹B nucleus with sufficient energy to overcome the mutual Coulomb repulsion would yield a stable ¹²C nucleus, but instead we get a proton-catalyzed fission neatly (and apparently with negligible other-nuclei byproducts, as one typically finds in heavy-element fission, with their wide range of smaller product nuclei) into three alpha particles, i.e. ⁴He nuclei.

Alpha particles are extremely stable and a common decay product.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Alpha particles are extremely stable and a common decay product.

"Common decay product" - of what kinds of decay? Heavy-radioactive-element decay chains, sure. But e.g. in stars one builds heavier elements from lighter up to Iron, not the other way around.

One can of course fission lighter-element nuclei by hitting them with sufficiently-high-energy protons to produce a nucleus with so much residual-energy-above-binding that it flies apart, or with neutrons such the result is an unstable isotope (e.g. hit the stable natural isotope ⁷Li with a neutron, result is isotopically-unstable ⁸Li, one of whose neutrons spits out an electron giving a ⁸Be nucleus which subsequently decays into a pair of alphas. But the above reaction involves hitting a ¹¹B nucleus with a proton having enough energy to get past the Coulomb barrier, but not so much that I would expect the resulting isotopically-stable ¹²C nucleus to fly apart based on too-much-residual-kinetic-energy grounds.